Page:Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies Volume II.djvu/30

Rh este mandict a perpetuite, possible de Dieu et des hommes."

Then a horse that he was about to mount, shied, rose up and fell, rolling over him, so that all his ribs were broken. He was confined to his bed for almost four years; crippled and lame, without being able to move because of pain.

When he was able to rise again the new order of things was in full progress, and when the iron hand of Henri IV., this cunning Navarrese and secret Huguenot, swept over France, the old court life also disappeared. Brantôme was sickly and when the old Queen-mother Medici also died (1590) he buried himself completely in his abbey and took no interest henceforth in the events of his time.

"Chaffoureur du papier"—this might be the motto of his further life. Alas, writing was also such a resignation for Brantôme, otherwise he would not have heaped such abuse upon it. But we must not imagine that his literary talent only developed after his unfortunate fall. Naturally he made quite different and more extensive use of it under these conditions than he otherwise would have done. Stirring up his old memories became more and more a means of mastering the sterile life of that period. Literature is a product of impoverished life. It is the opium intoxication of memory, the conjuring up of bygone events. The death-shadowed eyes of Alençon had seen the first fragments of the book of Fair and Gallant Ladies. The Rondomontades Espagnoles must have been finished in 1590, for he offered them to the Queen of Navarre in the Castle of Usson in Auvergne. But beginning in 1590 there was a conscious exchange of the sword for the pen. He knew himself well. On his bed of pain the recollections of his varied life, his sufferings and the complaints of his thwarted ambitions became a longed-for distraction. He died July 16, 1614, and was buried in the Chapel of Richemond.

His manuscripts had a strange fate. They were the principal care of his last will and testament. This in itself is a monument to his pride. "J'ai bien de l'ambition," he writes,